What’s in the water?

BHP, the London-listed mining giant, released its half-year profit earnings this morning, on 19th February.

Their net profit for June-December 2018 increased to $3.8 billion, up 90 percent from the last half of 2017.

But it comes at a cost: clean water for mining-affected communities.

Iron ore is the mining giant’s biggest earner – this was even before the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster on 25 January. Since then, the price of iron ore has soared.

In the last half of 2018, BHP reported a net loss of $US210 million in relation to 2015’s #Samarco dam failure. The company has paid only 8,200 damages claims and is still in the process of resettling people who lost their homes over three years ago. Another 260,000 claims for temporary interruption to water supplies following the dam failure are waiting to be paid.

To challenge this gross display of corporate power and impunity, we’re publishing short film ‘What’s in the water?’, today.

Filmed by Rainbow Collective, edited and produced by Threepenny Festival, in association with LMN and War on Want. It has been funded by LUSH Charity Pot.

It features three of our community representatives who visited the UK in October for the BHP annual general meeting. Rosa María Mateus from Colombian organisation Colectivo de Abogados (CINEP), Leticia Oliveria from Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), and Lucio Cuenca Berger, director of the Observatory for Environmental Conflicts in Chile.